Frequently Asked Questions About Digital Transformation

Welcome to the Enginess Digital Transformation FAQ, a list of our most frequently asked questions about digital transformation and how it applies to the enterprise.

If you've ever come across terms related to digital transformation and been in the dark about what they meant, or simply wondered what the difference is between digitalization and digitization, this collection of our most frequently asked questions should get you the answers you're looking for.

What is a digital transformation in business?

Digital transformation in business is when businesses leverage existing digital technology and deploy new digital solutions so they can be better at whatever they do.

This often goes along with centralizing existing technology, adding and scaling new technology, replacing processes, and changing systems so that they can better serve customers in a digital age (and cut costs and boost productivity while they’re at it).

What is digital transformation consulting?

Digital transformation consulting, or DTC, is when a consulting company helps senior leaders (usually C-suite) find and leverage digital solutions and digital strategies to help them better meet demands.

This usually includes three major parts:

Finding vendors (e.g. we know we need a CSP, but we don’t know which CSP)

Strategic consultation (how can we be better by using technology?)

Finding solutions to serve customers with digital customer experience, and the operations that go along with that (we know our customers are online but we don’t know how to serve them that way).

What is digital change management?

If digital transformation and DTC tend to focus on technology, digital change management is the people involved. It’s the process of both implementing the changes you’ve so carefully orchestrated, and ensuring that key staff throughout your organization are both bought in and action the changes.

It’s also about changing how organizations think, so the framework of what’s possible shifts to reflect a new digital reality.

What is the meaning of digitalization?

Digitalization is when you use digital technology to improve your business. Specifically, it’s when you use digital tools to:

Increase revenue

Make processes more efficient

Drive digital business

Digitalization is fundamentally about net new business or process creation.

For instance, a brick-and-mortar store opening an e-commerce platform is digitalization – it’s a net new digital asset, not an improvement over existing processes.

What is the meaning of digitization?

In contrast to digitalization, digitization is turning existing non-digital processes into digital ones.

For instance, instead of creating an e-commerce store (digitalization), digitization is using a cloud-based accounting system to replace a paper filing system. Same system, same process, different (and digital) tool.

There are two parts to this. First, it’s the process of turning an existing analog product or record into a digital one. For instance, turning a paper-based change approval into a digital one by scanning it into a PDF.

Second, it’s about the automation of business processes and workflows. For instance, when you take that scanned copy and use it to automatically kick off the change workflow.

Over time, these processes and workflows become completely digital – and thus, are digitized.

What is the digitization of records?

The digitization of records is digitization but on a much larger scale.

Essentially, digitization happens at an organization- or enterprise-level: one company can choose to digitize their processes and workflow and undergo the digitalization processes to expand their business without a broader ecosystem.

Digitization of records is when digitization (and usually digitalization too) happens at an industry or vertical level. It’s when a digital ecosystem and infrastructure are grown, and then records are digitized en masse to shift an entire industry.

A good analogy is Sweden changing what side of the road everyone drives on in 1967.

The value of the switch can only be captured if everyone does it all at once. Likewise, digitization of records is only feasible if everyone in the ecosystem participates.

For instance, if one small clinic has digital health records, that’s not especially useful because patients have to go to other labs, hospitals, and specialists to process that data.

But if everyone gets a digital health record, and there are digitalization processes afoot to change how people engage with digital records, and there’s digitization at an organizational level, then everyone benefits.

Even the best, most engaging content will fail if it’s not deployed in a sound strategic framework. However, navigating many different channels, formats, platforms, and audiences can be a daunting task for an enterprise content strategy.

Which should come first, content or design? It can be difficult to know when you’re forming a strategic direction for a digital project. We are firm believers that content should come before design, and with good reason.

How can digital transformation improve the quality of care provided by long-term care facilities? In this article, we explore what the healthcare industry can learn from other digitally transformed industries.

We put together a quick guide for what we hope to see from professional associations in the near future. We think these tips will help organizations keep their audience engaged and keep their enrollment numbers high.

Ideas of accessibility and inclusiveness have started to take hold in the digital world. We take a look at the benefits of adopting common principles for website accessibility and why you should make your website accessible

Accessibility standards for website compliance are mandatory for many organizations in Ontario. Those who do not meet accessibility guidelines can face substantial fines. Find out what your site needs to be compliant.

Digital transformation allows businesses to capitalize on opportunities presented by digital technology. It is changing the way we tackle challenges like pollution, public health issues, and sustainable transportation.

These 8 web design tools will help web designers who are just starting out, small businesses who are looking to build their own site, or just the amateur enthusiast who’s looking to up their design chops.

We helped transform more than just Teknion's website – we also helped transform their approach to digital technology, and repositioned the company into a faster, more efficient, customer-first organization.

When we worked with the Teknion team on their organization’s digital transformation, we spent time understanding their challenges, breaking those broad challenges into specific problems, and then planning how to solve them.

Find out how you can use animation on your site to improve your content, where you might have opportunity to use animation, the pros and cons of animations on your overall site experience, and some resources you can use to get animations up and running fast.

What changes will 2017 bring to the mobile market? Website's whose design changes depending on the age of the visitor? App consolidation? We look a promising few we think you should also keep your eyes on.

Content is the lifeblood of any website, and Content Management Systems (CMS) is the heart that keeps the blood flowing. So we put together a few questions you might want to ask when you’re either choosing a CMS for the first time or changing from you existing system.

When it comes to picking a CMS, there are a number of factors to consider, but one of the questions you may ask yourself is, which is the top CMS platform by usage? This infographic answers that question!

Change management is how you actually implement changes like CMS process automation. A leading cause of a project needing rescue isn’t that the change is bad or the project didn’t work, but rather people just didn’t carry it through.

Within a web development team roles and responsibilities are pretty clearly defined: the graphic designer makes the site beautiful, the UX designer makes sure it works, the front-end developer programs the front-end and a back-end developer handles the back-end. The project management ("PM") is obviously in charge of managing the project, but what does that mean?

A customized solution, be it an application, a CMS, or a custom site, usually performs better for longer than an out-of-the-box alternative. However, we still find that many businesses struggle to see the value of a custom option.

Many of the standard features of popular websites are not actually core features of the CMS – they’re plugins. And while this might not seem particularly important, it can be a challenge when you think you’re buying an off-the-shelf CMS product that has everything you need, and find out it doesn’t come with basic functionality you would expect. Additionally, adding on numerous plugins can have a major impact on your site speed and in turn how effective your website is. Here’s a quick rundown of a few standard CMS features that do not in fact come as standard.

In late May, Google hosted its annual Google I/O event, where it announced its major product launches and updates. There were a few surprises and a lot of big changes. Here are the highlights that developers and designers should be taking note of.

Millennials are a generation of well educated, well paid individuals, and they’re known to be fiercely loyal to the brands they love. But how do you get them to love you? Here’s what millennials are looking for when they go online.

Mobile navigation is hard because, screen space comes at a premium. The more robust and detailed your navigation, the more space it takes up. And the more space your nav takes up, the less space you have to do stuff with your website – like sell things, feature content, convert leads, or tell stories.

This time last year, those involved with websites were waiting for what had been termed “Mobilegeddon”: Google’s then upcoming algorithmic change that was going to totally shake up how we search online. Twelve months on we are left with one question: what actually happened?

You know what they say: you only get to make one first impression. The same is true for your web presence – you only get one shot at grabbing your visitor’s attention and keeping it long enough to make an impact.

By this point, we shouldn’t only be designing for mobile compatibility – rather, we should design for mobility; applying the principles of mobile design to each and every touch point with the end-user.

Here are 15 ways you can stay healthy and feel better right in the office. A little bit of effort, every day, will improve your mood, your fitness, and make you feel much less guilty about taking that second (or third) piece of chocolate cake.

Good communication is the basis of all relationships between designers and clients, and is especially important when it comes time for designers to justify a design. Unfortunately, this is an area that is also often fraught with problems.

Content for your website is no longer a blog post every other week written haphazardly by an intern. Now, content needs to be clearly thought out, with objectives and goals, KPIs, and long term management plans. That’s content strategy, and now is the time to invest in it.

If your site isn’t already mobile friendly, you need to future-proof your website and your company against the impending mobile tsunami. Here are a few things that you can do in 2016 to make sure your web presence remains competitive in a mobile-first world.

Is all engagement created equal? The short answer is no. The long answer is that engagement is a tricky concept, and it can be extremely misleading if relied on too heavily. Here’s what it is, when it might lead you astray, and how you can use it most effectively.

Mobile health, or health is based around patient-led care with apps, portals, social media, and health content. It’s set to change how we all view and participate in our healthcare system. Here’s a summary of the major trends so you can stay on top of the mhealth movement.

ASO is App Store Optimization. Essentially, it’s the process of making your app come up first when people search for things in an app store, like the App Store, Play Store, or Windows Store. It’s like SEO, but instead of a website it’s an app, and instead of a search engine it’s the app store search function.

App targeting is really an exercise in audience segmentation. It’s about splitting your audience into different groups based on behaviour and sending push notifications accordingly. There are a mountain of advantages to this, but we think there are a few worth special mention.

A little over a year ago, we were talking about whether or not your company needed an app for the soon to-be-released Apple Watch. We wanted to revisit our article and see if our opinion held. Here’s what we came up with.

But some companies are using social media for a different purpose – customer service. This post is going to look at why companies are using social media for customer service and a few companies who are doing a really good job.

With the mountain of social media networks out there it’s hard which networks your brand should be active on and which ones are just a waste of valuable resources. Today we’re going to drill into Instagram – who should have an account, some different ways you can use the platform, and ultimately if it’s worth the time and money.

With iOS 9 supporting ad blockers, there’s serious concern that the media-driven mobile web as we know it is about to end. Here’s what’s going on, and how you can ad-blocker-proof your next big online move.

Confused about image file formats? We’ve put together a quick and dirty guide for you, so you always use the right format where you need it. We’ll cover JPEGs, GIFs, PNG files, SVG files, and TIFs – what they are, and when you should use them.

If you want to get traction online, you’ve got to be in business with Google. Unfortunately, if you don’t play by its rules, Google can take your traffic away. Here’s how to recognize if you’re being penalized by Google and what you can do about it.

Vector images are not based on pixels at all. Instead, they’re based on various simple geometric shapes that make up a larger image and use mathematical formulas to explain where these shapes are in relation to each other.

140 characters or 140,000? How long to make your content is a tremendously important question for anyone hoping to attract attention online. And as it turns out, there is a correct answer. Since about 2012, there’s been a steady shift towards longer content of around 2,000 words or more, and away from the Seth Godin-esque content morsels.

The Glass Explorer program was pretty much a flop. Some design limitations, major communication problems, and bad PR meant that Glass was never once seen as a viable mainstream product, forever regulated to the fringes of the tech world.

Rapid prototype testing is a simple concept – it’s taking a quick and dirty prototype and testing it among a bigger group of stakeholders, designers, and end-users. The core idea here is that the more testing and feedback you get, and the earlier you get it, the better your end product is going to be.

At Moveable Online, we’re lucky enough to get the chance to work closely with internal teams as well as independently on projects. This versatility has given us a unique perspective on when and how projects go wrong, as well as when they go really well.

Apple’s new Force Touch technology lets you have different ‘strengths’ of a touch, and you can build interaction around that differentiation. That is, you have a soft and a hard press do different things.

Redesigning your website is no easy feat. It’s a delicate process, balancing tight timelines and budgets on the one hand with demanding (and often conflicting) stakeholder visions and objectives on the other. To (hopefully) make your redesign go a little bit smoother, here are our top tips when you’re in the planning stage.

Over the last 2 years or so, there’s been an interesting typographical trend working away in the background, with curvaceous script fonts, hand written fonts, Egyptian, and sans serif all mixing together to form beautiful mixed typography.

Every few years, Microsoft releases a video that showcases its vision of what the future of technology would be. This year, their video focuses on productivity and showcases technologies like giant touchscreens, holograms (which shouldn’t come as a surprise), 3D printers and flexible displays.

If companies make business decisions informed by data and research, if they create amazing experiences with single-function apps, and if they develop detailed post-download strategies to keep their users coming back, they can gain an enormous advantage with apps.

Business today runs on tech. From the smallest shoe shiner to Exxon Mobil, no matter what you sell, technology is probably a pretty big part of what you do. Enterprise-level software and internal systems in particular are prone to poor user experiences, compatibility problems, spreadsheet-like UI density, and poor data access – all of which create inefficiencies.

The UX toolbox has an enormous range of methods and techniques to help designers know what users want and expect from a particular design. One of the simplest techniques that they deploy is the Heuristic Evaluation.

With web design moving inexorably towards better mobile experiences, a lot of B2B companies are turning towards iconography to represent products and services. But quality does not always come with quantity.

There’s often a ‘just go’ ethos in tech design and development projects, and as a result strategic planning can fall by the wayside. Budgets just don't have the time or space for it. Unfortunately, it’s a recipe for projects to fall behind, with a finished product that is neither what customers need nor what stakeholders want. Fortunately, strategic planning can fix these problems by:

Enterprise apps are a world apart from their consumer counterparts, and have to deal with things like security, multiple user profiles, legacy system integration, and a hundred and one other problems and challenges.

For almost everyone, copy is the driving force of online functionality, marketing, and sales. Engaging your customer, working them through a sales funnel, and finally closing a sale are all actions that are facilitated and enabled by copy.

When marketers talk about engagement, what they’re actually talking about is the behaviour of consumers, and extrapolating back to attitudes. Our measures of engagement are our best guesses as to what consumers are thinking and feeling when they see our marketing content.

It might be a little early to begin predicting what 2015 is going to bring, but in the tech world, we're always looking forward to the next big thing. Here at Moveable Online, we're on the lookout for what we think is going to be the next innovation, or what existing fringe products are ready to hit the mainstream.

Smartphones in our pockets now have way more pixels than the Jumbotron screens that used to be littered along Times Square. This means that the image is sharper and more realistic than ever, as more pixels mean less ‘blockiness' as each individual pixel (smaller) is harder to see independently from the image it helps form.

Storytelling has been with us since the beginning of culture. We’ve used the narrative to pass along information long before the written word, and in the age of the internet, it stays a powerful tool to compel and convert.

Good SEO comes with web design best practices and an active online presence. Two ways to do this are with good semantic markup and numerous back links. The third is a blog presence. Google indexes blog posts much quicker than other pages (if done correctly) because they update so frequently. A quickly updating blog with the right keyword usage, great headline and content, will help move your website up Google search results faster.

All the time, new tech and applications are being created by developers and companies trying to push UI forward to that next big step in usability. Here are a few examples of those emerging technologies to pay attention to:

If you manage web content using a standard CMS, chances are you jump back and forth between the visual and HTML editors now and again. Some do it more than others. We do it a lot. Which is why we have a problem with using smart quotes (e.g. “smart” and not "smart") on the web.

From too much content, to auto-playing sound, we go over some of the food and beverage industry’s most common lapses in judgment when it comes to websites, and briefly give some pointers on what to strive for, like saying more with less, clean design and easy navigation, as well as smart image use.

Whether you’re a large corporation or a small startup, an internal tablet or iPad app created specifically for your workplace’s needs can streamline workflow, communication and problem solving, allowing an "always on" connection between employees.

A website that is mostly text will usually come with a very high bounce rate, as users quickly burn out. But there’s no need to avoid making your website richer and more engaging. Here we’ll go over a few ways to leverage modern web technologies and assets to make the user experience more engaging.

The Internet of Things is about extending the web into the real world. It’s a different type of connectivity – one that blends the gap between online and offline and is helping to disrupt not just how businesses and platforms on web browsers function, but off of them as well.

There are a number of good reasons for website administrators to consider expanding their web presence to multiple sites. Whether an organization is planning a microsite for a new service or product, a new region-specific website for a new office location, or something as simple as setting up a blog, expanding a single site configuration into a multisite network could be a good idea – and it will certainly make managing your web properties more efficient if it’s done properly.

Today, Leap Motion announced they were releasing a new attachment that will allow developers to attach their motion-tracking devices to the front of an Oculus Rift virtual reality headset, and they will be updating their software accordingly to be better suited to track gestures facing forward or down, whereas currently tracking capabilities are only from a table looking up.

We've collected 6 key features and trends that businesses should keep in mind for their annual reports this year – which, if you don’t want to be left behind, should be primed for digitization and online distribution.

The grid system has long been touted by web designers as a standard “go-to” when designing for mobile devices. It creates great usability and an instantly clean looking content orientation, so of course designers are using it for mobile. So… why exactly should they limit that functionality to just mobile? Well, the answer is that they shouldn't.

A customizable CMS is a great way to help those that don't have a technical background make a contribution to your publishing workflow. It helps to facilitate website maintenance and design changes, too.

Despite the competition, real estate brokers are far from obsolete. Many people are more comfortable buying and selling property via an agent. What's changed is that before they decide to use your services, they will probably research your company online.

According to Google, smartphones are at the heart of online interactions while IAB says that mobile advertising is now a $7 billion dollar a year business. It's a safe bet that the advertising dollars are following the growing audience and that's why you must include content suitable for mobile devices in your multi-channel publishing strategy.

Multi-channel publishing definitely has challenges. Your content has to work equally well for short status updates on Twitter or Facebook and for longer articles and white papers. And then there's the matter of your readers. As Google's research found, it's a multi-screen world, where people may see your content on a smartphone, tablet, laptop, PC or even a smart television.

A content management system (CMS) is just for content, right? Wrong! A CMS is designed for effective creation, approval and release of content. The good news is that the processes you use to do that can be used to manage any workflow and improve efficiency. Here's how this could work.

As a company, you can no longer afford to leave your social media strategy to chance. There’s just too much competition for your audience’s attention. The latest statistics from Pew Internet show that 73% of online adults use social media regularly. How do you get them to pay attention to what your company offers? It’s all about the strategy, which is why we’ve collected some articles and templates to help you get started with this important area.

Moveable Online is exhibiting at this year’s Dx3 conference in Toronto on Wednesday and Thursday, March 5 and 6. Dx3 is “Canada’s largest conference and tradeshow dedicated to all things digital. It brings agencies, brands, publishers and retailers together for two days of networking and education.”

A new (and currently free) online tool, SumAll, makes multi-channel analytics management easy. It allows you to connect to major social networks, blogging platforms, analytics tools, email marketing platforms, e-commerce platforms and more, so you can see all of your business' online activity in one single view.

If you've been paying attention to recent developments in search engine optimization (SEO) you've probably heard about voice search, the technology that allows you to talk to your computer or mobile device and have it talk back to you.

Although mobile apps have been around for years, 2013 was the year that many sites put a focus on mobile website optimization. One of the most popular mobile trends this year was responsive web design.

Using social business tools can help improve the customer experience, boost productivity in the workplace and enhance innovation. All this is achieved by doing what these tools do best – enabling free flowing and interactive communication.

The Human Resources Professionals Association (HRPA) understood that many organizations weren't sure where to start with addressing the accessibility issue, and produced the below informative, albeit goofy, videos to explain the issue.

We love Google's Universal Analytics because it's giving us some insights we just weren't getting before. So we set out to find some recent tips to help us – and you – understand the power of this new tool. Here's the roundup.

After slowly increasing its secure searches over the past two years, increasing the amount of (not provided) keywords in your analytics, Google has now made all of its searches encrypted using HTTPS, meaning search in the very near future, keyword data will no longer be passed to analytics applications.

Should your business invest in developing a mobile app? Research earlier this year showed that mobile apps had increased their share of the search market as people used proprietary apps rather than search engines to search for content on particular sites.

People have been predicting the end of the social media bubble for some time now – it seems almost since the rise of social media – and an article in Inc is just the latest to reinforce this viewpoint.

This report is the third in a series of website analysis performed by Moveable Online usability experts. The purpose of this analysis was to create an accurate and measurable framework to determine the current state of the digital properties of high profile Canadian businesses spanning multiple industries.

We are in the midst of a sea change within the world of mobile app development. Across the country within the app stores for both iOS and Android platforms, users are downloading and purchasing more business apps than ever before.

A new trend of hiding the sticky website navigation when you’re scrolling down makes the design and usability feature even better, by presenting the sticky navigation only when you are looking to use it.

This presentation shows the results of a survey conducted by Moveable Online at Dx3 Canada, a business and networking event in Toronto that focused on digital marketing, advertising and retailing. Given the number of digital marketers who attended, it was an ideal chance to gauge the state of digital business in Canada,

If your organization has yet to make the proper investment into mobile – either by standing by your desktop experience as ‘good enough’, or only implementing a half-baked solution, you’ll want to pay attention to the following two important announcements Google made this week.

It's been just a little over a month since we implemented Google's new Universal Analytics code on our main website, running alongside our classic analytics code, but already the difference in results is substantial – in a good way.

This week saw the introduction of two new devices – the Blackberry Q10 and Samsung Galaxy S4 – that are already having an impact on the way that web and mobile app developers are viewing the interfaces they’re creating.

We often talk about the importance of optimizing websites for mobile, and much of the time the focus is on smartphone users. However, recent statistics show tablet users are a much more important audience to target when communicating with business professionals.

We are starting to see data visualization as a much more important factor in web analytics for many of our clients, but more importantly we are seeing the need for a single “critical indicator” for organizations to identify and strive towards and measure success against.

For the second year in a row, Moveable Online exhibited at Dx3 Canada, a digital media conference held in Toronto. In addition to meeting-and-greeting at our booth, several of our attendees also attended a selection of the educational sessions. Shared below is each attendee's thoughts on their Dx3 experience.

The latest platform for competition in the technology sector is inarguably screen resolution. With Apple's Retina displays, Samsung's Super AMOLED screens, and 4k resolution screens making their way onto user's desktops and mobile devices, it's clear that the future of the web is going to be in high definition. But there will still be a long transition period before every web user is on a screen that can appreciate high pixel density images. For instance, the iPhone 4/4S/5 all have high pixel density screens, but iMacs still do not, and may not for some time. So, does it make sense to switch to only high resolution images on your site just yet?

"Mobile first" is a common phrase to hear these days, meaning that when an organization is planning its web strategy, they should think about the mobile user first and foremost, and build out the rest of the web or app experience from there.

The number of mobile devices in the world will exceed the planet’s population this year. With the adoption of responsive design and the expansion of OS-specific mobile apps, some think delivery of content to these mobile users is just an afterthought, but in fact a proper mobile strategy and mobile content strategy should be considered.

Using eye tracking technology to support a gaze contingent display, focus or "fixation points" can be rendered at a higher resolution that areas out of the users current focus. This is known as foveated imaging.

After starting out as a 'move now or be left behind' reactive strategy, corporate involvement in social media has now matured to the point where companies are starting to see the real cost of social spending, and will want to see a return on that investment.

Over the course of 2012, we saw many changes in the way search results are delivered. Search essentially became much smarter, delivering contextual results based on a user’s query, and including much more information on results pages rather than a list of links. One of the biggest changes seen was the influx of rich snippets in results, coming from marking up a webpage with microdata.

Social media goes beyond marketing to drive innovation, among other things. Stowe Boyd explains the changing landscape of business and how social business is disruptive beyond a simple veneer over traditional business structures.